Satanic panic gripped America in the 1980s, like a modern-day Salem witch hunt, and suddenly the Devil was everywhere - especially in Natalie Burns’ town where she and a few other kids, later dubbed the “Satanic Six”, accused teachers of heinous acts, claiming Satan was involved, leading to horrible consequences for all concerned.
Decades later and someone is murdering the members of the Satanic Six and Natalie’s gotta go on the run. Teaming up with a disgraced FBI agent, they have to try and save the remaining others and figure out who’s killing them all. It couldn’t be Satan… could it?
Like their last book, Where the Body Was, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ latest collab, Houses of the Unholy, is another standalone book. It’s a twisty little number riffing on real life hysteria (Satanic panic was - arguably still is - a thing) and isn’t a bad comic but it’s not up there with their best either.
The story jumps between the present and the past throughout but the present storyline is much more compelling than the flashbacks, which become tedious and slow the narrative down. They provide some necessary backstory on the characters but often repeats itself - yeah yeah, we get it, Satan, blah blah - and feels like these are included to pad the book out to an acceptable length.
The present-day storyline though is unpredictable and often interesting. Natalie’s a professional kidnapper, tracking down kids who’ve joined cults and bringing them back to their concerned parents - that whole opening scene is pretty damn good. Brubaker includes more intriguing figures like Agent West and Natalie’s conspiracy nut brother Brendan and this narrative moves at a decent clip.
That said, the story never totally made sense to me - Agent West’s presence, the point of the murders - so I wasn’t surprised with the twist as I was waiting for something like that to happen given the half-(Bru)baked plot. The final act is a bit weak too. It’s a fault of this kind of story - anything Devil-worshipper-related tends to end in few limited ways, which skews towards the melodramatic and silly rather than coming off as exciting or scary - so I’m a little disappointed to see Brubaker fall back on convention like this rather than attempt something different to the well-worn formula. A certain character’s turncoat motivations too were especially unconvincing when stated out loud.
I found Houses of the Unholy to be by turns entertaining and boring. The narrative as a whole is pretty good until the final act where it all falls apart in an anticlimactic mess. The present day scenes are a lot of fun though there are too many flashbacks so that the narrative never gets to build substantial momentum. Sean Phillips’ art is what it always is: dependable and competent, if unexciting and occasionally bland.
Definitely not their best book, nor among their worst, Houses of the Unholy is a middling addition to the ever-growing Brubaker/Phillips library.
No comments:
Post a Comment